


Find the One Safe Way

by epersonae, hops



Series: the only life you could save [10]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angus is Baby Magcretia, Collaboration, Gen, Past Relationship(s), Post-Canon, Tea and Cookies and Difficult Conversations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-02
Updated: 2018-01-02
Packaged: 2019-02-26 14:58:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13238166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epersonae/pseuds/epersonae, https://archiveofourown.org/users/hops/pseuds/hops
Summary: Taako and Lucretia try talking one more time. It doesn't go how either of them expect.





	Find the One Safe Way

**Author's Note:**

> Title from [Amy aka Spent Gladiator 1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sNakKm3Pr0) by The Mountain Goats.
> 
> [leans in too close to the mic] Uh... hi everyone, happy new year. @Epersonae and I wrote this really cool and important collab that went somewhere we never expected it to go and we hope ya like it. It's very much a culmination of both of our existing collections of work so... if you're familiar with those, Excellent, if you're not, a few things you should know! 
> 
> This fic leans on Stolen Century Taagnus and Magcretia both. They have a relationship that's very much "this is my boyfriend, Magnus, and my boyfriend's boyfriend, Taako," (so... not Taako/Lucretia, *hard* pass) but they were very much best friends. Also, in here, Angus is Magnus and Lucretia's son. I think that's it! 
> 
> I needed tissues writing this so. Heed my weak warning.

Lucretia takes the cup from Taako: the china is thin and delicate, but decorated with sparkling skeletal hands. The scent of the tea rises and she breathes it in deeply. Even without tasting, she knows it's perfect, though she sips before speaking.

“Thank you, that's just how I take it.”

Taako rolls his eyes. “Yeah, I know it is. Only made it 36,500 times.” 

She closes her eyes, takes a second to sip without snapping back. Counts down from ten. The point of this was to work out whatever they needed to before it accidentally got out of hand in front of…other people. There will be a lot of other people at Angus’s graduation. But she can't help herself. 

“Surely not  _ that _ many times. It’s not as though I never made it myself.”

“You know I stopped learning math half a century ago.” He says dismissively, but a smile just barely touches the corner of his mouth. 

“You always say that, and I don't actually believe it's true. I think….” She pauses. “Never mind.”

He cocks a brow, the corner of his mouth quirking immediately back to a frown. “Share with the class, Luce.” 

“No.” Another sip of tea. Hot, sweet but not  _ too  _ sweet, a touch of milk. “I promised them. It's only….” She shakes her head. “Sometimes it seems as though you prefer being thought the fool. Keep expectations low, perhaps? Or just get everyone to let down their guard.” A sigh. “Anyway. Sorry.”

He hesitates for a moment. “I wasn’t playing the fool when I was resident  _ idiot wizard,”  _ he says sharply, avoiding the rest of her accusation with deliberation. 

“I know. Do you need me to apologize again? Or is there something else?” Angus had asked, Magnus had seconded, and she was going to grit her teeth and do this. Whatever  _ this  _ was. 

Taako takes a deep breath in and picks up a macaron. He’s surprisingly calm when he speaks again. “Old habits, right? But anything for the kid, I guess.” 

A genuine smile crosses her face. “He's doing so well, isn't he? You must be proud of his work at the school.”

“He’s always showin’ me up. Makes it hard to keep your street cred when he’s…” Taako waves his hands vaguely. “Y’know. Angus.” 

“I doubt that he's deliberately trying to show you up, Taako.” Her expression, on someone with less gravitas, might've been an eye roll. “He's just a very sharp young man. You don't have to take it so personally. Although….” She chuckles. “I don't  _ think  _ he's vindictive, but maybe it's dear old McDonald's silverware.”

Taako snorts despite himself. “If he  _ is  _ that vindictive, I’ve never been prouder.” He pauses for a moment, avoiding her eyes and looking at the shelf of his spices, organized and re-organized twice before her arrival, behind her. His hand lingers on the handle of his teacup. “I’m just yankin’ your chain, though. I’m proud of the little nerd.”

“Good, good. You tell him that once in a while, right?” Lucretia steeples her fingers and stares intently at him. 

Taako waves a hand dismissively. “‘Course I do,” he says, not quite convincing. “How about you worry about playing house, and Taako takes care of his own biz?” 

She raises an eyebrow. “ _ Playing house _ ?” She reaches out to the plate of cookies between them. 

Taako snatches a macaron off the plate before she does and takes a quick bite, chewing silently as he watches her do the same. 

“You know what I’m saying.” He feels heat rising in his face. 

“Do I?” She turns the macaron - delicate, lavender - over in her hands before taking a small bite. “These are still baller, by the way. And If you're trying to say something about my living arrangements….” She takes another bite, leaving the question hanging in the air. 

“If you’d stop beating the hell out of your egg whites, yours could hold a candle, y’know…” He finishes off his macaron and chews for a long moment. “And for the record, I don’t give a shit about your living arrangements.”

“Well that's good, because they're none of your business. So what is it then?” She eats the remaining crescent of macaron. 

His jaw tightens. “All I’m saying is, how about you and Magnus worry about  _ whatever  _ you’ve got going with the kid, and I worry about my own. I don’t need parenting advice from  _ you,  _ of all people.” 

She sucks in a breath. “There it is.” She lays a hand flat on the table, looking at the web of wrinkles, feeling her own little surge of anger and guilt twisting together. “I'm…. I'm not trying to give you  _ parenting  _ advice, I'm just….” She looks past his shoulder at the kitchen window: curtains printed with pink skulls. Then her voice is soft, almost as if she’s talking to herself. “No, you weren't there, you don't know. Maybe I don't deserve to be his mother now, but….” She shakes her head.

“Huh,  _ I wasn’t there.  _ Yeah, I mean, no fuckin’ shit—” he spits, but he stops himself as she stares out the window behind him. He’d promised Angus he would try, but his stomach contorts with a familiar rage, one that lay dormant within him for a long time as they’d avoided each other and built their own new lives. He takes pause and thinks about Kravitz, about Lup and Barry, about the school and Ren and Angus and all the good things he tries to remind himself of when he’s ready to fly off the handle. “You’re his mother, whether you  _ deserve it  _ or not. Spare me the drama.” He rolls his eyes. “But don’t think that ‘cause you’re blood you’ve got some kind of final say, ‘cause he’s— he matters to a lot of people, not just you and the big idiot.” 

She laughs with a snort. “Spare  _ you  _ the drama, yes of course. And of course, he adores you. If it wasn't for him and ‘the big idiot’, we wouldn't even be trying this, right? We're both perfectly capable of continuing to ignore each other’s existence.” She frowns slightly. “Honestly, if we could just shake on it and promise to be polite at the ceremony, we don't need to do this.” She picks up the cup again, inhales the scent of the tea, then another sip: exactly the way she took it for a hundred years. She would never tell him, but it is better than when she makes her own tea, and she has no idea why. She curls her hands around the warmth. “Unless…. This isn't just for them, is it?”

“It’s not for you, if that’s what you’re getting at.” He cradles his cup and raises it to his lips, blowing on it even though it’s not hot enough anymore to warrant it. He still isn’t entirely sure why he’d asked her here in the first place. Agreements of civility don’t always need to be handled face-to-face. “Don’t try to get all kumbaya on me. It’s not gonna play out in your favor.” 

He thinks about Angus. He thinks about  _ Magnus _ . No, it isn’t for them. It’s  _ about  _ them.  It’s for himself. His throat tightens as he looks at her, her eyes serious, her lips tight. The same old Lucretia. 

“I didn’t want tomorrow to be a shock, is all. It’s…” He takes pause and looks down at his hands, now in his lap. “It digs up some old bullshit when you’re around. So don’t flatter yourself. I’m just looking out for me.”

“Hmmm.” She takes a second macaron, and he does too. “I didn’t mean to imply that it was for  _ me _ . Only perhaps that….”

She shakes her head. She’s been bracing herself for days, anticipating: she doesn’t know exactly what. The little sideways jabs hurt, like always, but they’re something she’s used to, maybe, mostly. It’s the deeper pain underneath that she can sense but not reach. 

She stares at the cookie as if it might hold the answers. During the years alone, she'd tried making them a few times. It had always gone badly. “There’s such a fine line,” she murmurs, “between beating in enough air to get that rise out of the whites and beating it so hard that they go flat again.” She chews slowly, deliberately. It dissolves into nothingness on her tongue. 

“You have to  _ stop  _ beating when you get stiff peaks. If you’d use lemon juice to stabilize the meringue like I  _ told you,  _ maybe you’d have an easier time.”

He takes a bite with purpose and puts the macaron down on his dish. She opens her mouth as if to reply, but he cuts her off. 

“But when have you listened to me, anyway?” 

He’s pushing her again, and this time she decides not to push back. It’s a game she didn’t come here to play, and one that she can’t win. 

“I suppose,” she says, letting it drop. “Maybe I thought you needed to say something I hadn’t heard yet.”

Taako laughs bitterly and leans back in his chair. “Sure, ‘Creesh, since you asked so nicely, I’ll spell it out, I guess. Being around you is fucking hard. Being around you and Magnus is harder. And being around you, Magnus,  _ and  _ the kid?” 

For just a moment, there are tears. And then he blinks. And then they’re gone. 

“Sure, it’s for me. Is that what you want me to say?” 

“I don’t  _ want _ you to say anything that isn’t true.” Her jaw tenses slightly; she sits up a little straighter. “I’m sorry...no, I’m not sorry that Magnus and Angus….” Her stiff posture slumps all at once and she puts her head in her hands. “Taako, I love them. I am sorry it hurts you, but I’m not sorry that they’re around for me. I couldn’t...I don’t know if I could’ve gone on if Magnus had…. I missed him so much. I missed all of you, but….” It’s her turn to blink away tears.

“Yeah, well, they’re my family too, and I don’t  _ get  _ to have them around for me.” He trembles down to his core, but he won’t show her. For once, he won’t pick a fight. He won’t give her the satisfaction. But for once, he just wants her to know how it hurts. “Angus is bad enough, but  _ Magnus…”  _

She sits up again abruptly and snaps, “Well that’s bullshit. You see them all the time. Angus lives at your school. Magnus looks forward to visiting you like it was a damn honeymoon every time. And when they’re gone, it’s not like you’re  _ alone _ .” She meant to keep it civil, she absolutely did, but it’s too much.

“It’s school, it’s  _ visits,  _ we don’t get to be a fucking  _ family.  _ Don’t act like you’re not still the epicenter of this shitshow.” he shoots back without missing a beat. “Don’t — don’t play that, ‘you’re not  _ alone,  _ Taako,’ bullshit, like it’s a fucking gift to me. I have this,” he motions with a flippant hand to the home around them, “because of  _ me.  _ I had to put my fucking life back together. But let’s not get into that, unless you want an encore,  _ Madam.”  _

Lucretia takes a deep breath, looks at her half-drunk cup of tea, her half-eaten macaron. Does she want to do this? Maybe she does. Maybe she needs to as much as he does. “Which of us has a family, Taako? Angus  _ visits _ . Magnus lives in Raven’s Roost most of the time. And when they’re gone, I don’t have handsome adoring Death, I don’t have a sister, and maybe that’s all my fault, but you don’t get to play the pity card with me now. We have the same amount of family as ever, and both of us have  _ more _ than we did. We  _ won _ , remember?”

The tips of his ears burn red. Maybe she is right. Maybe she isn’t so much better off. He still wants to fight with her, but he feels something else twisting him tight in the absence of anger. Sorrow, perhaps. Jealousy. “You had a kid with him. A chance for something fucking  _ normal _ . And you  _ threw it away.  _ I can’t even wrap my head around that, Luce. We used to talk about it, right?” He locks eyes with her. “Or did you forget? The life we’d have when we could stop running?” 

He has to will himself out of tears, but it doesn’t work as well as last time.

“We won. And hey, you’re right,” he concedes with just a touch of sharpness, “life ain’t bad. But it’s not the life we were supposed to have, and we have you to thank for that.” 

The anger drains out of her as quickly as it had welled up. “Was there ever going to be  _ normal _ for us? Really? And we stopped running, remember? We stopped running and everything was awful. We were broken before I…. I did a stupid thing because I couldn’t see any other way to unbreak us. Yes, we used to talk about what we were going to do, but we stopped doing that…. Nobody  _ listened _ to me, Taako. From the time at the Arcanum, almost ten years, I went along with that idea because everybody else thought it was so great, and then—” she waves her hands, she sees the scenes of destruction even more vividly than she’d been able to conjure them in her glass ball, the way she still does sometimes in her sleep “—and then that was that. And we didn’t talk about the future. Everyone was dust, except when they were peppermint candy, and Magnus wasn’t thinking about our future, he was worrying about whether someone was changing the past, and then Lup—” She takes the half macaron and breaks it in half again and eats one of the pieces.

“Don’t bring her into this!” He can’t stop the tears that spring from him now. “It’s not — this isn’t about  _ her.  _ It is… It was... “ Taako lets out a defeated, trembling breath and rests his forehead in his palm. “We were wrong. All of us, and you too. And what you did just drew it out for ten more years, I mean, Magnus got  _ married.  _ And  _ you _ —  _ you _ were off playing  _ queen _ for a day, and I was… You get it, right? Don’t tell me you’re so dense that you can’t see what the hell I’m getting at. The three of us—” 

“I know. I fucked it up thinking I could make it better.” She looks at her own trembling hands. “Not forgetting meant every day thinking about it, trying to tell myself I was doing the right thing, the best thing, something that—” Her breath hitched. “He got married. He fell in love and I saw them. It was….” Her face twists with something between grief and jealousy. “ _ They _ had that normal life, however short it was. And….” She lets out a soft laugh. “Queen for a day?”

He scoffs loudly. “You built yourself a  _ throne.”  _

She smiles, a bit embarrassed. “You got me, Taako. When I made the Bureau, I used what I learned from  _ you _ about adopting an aesthetic. You have to look the part, right? To be something that people take seriously. So I made the Bureau look formal. And by the time I found you all again, I'm sure it seemed…. But I tried it the other way, for years, being simple, humble, working alone. That’s how I went to Wonderland, anyway.” 

His quip about her poor taste in thrones leaves him at the mention of the place. He swipes the hand on his forehead down over his eyes and hardens himself to the tears he’d allowed. He remembers himself, slumped over, blood from his nose dripping onto a flashing neon floor. He remembers reaching for Magnus, looking down at Kravitz, encompassed by Merle’s hand. They’re not exactly the memories he’d planned on revisiting this afternoon. “You this fun at parties, now, too? Cake should be fun tomorrow. Jeezy creezy.” 

“Indeed.” She opens her hands up on the table. There are strange scars on her wrists that he’s only seen on the rare occasion when her sleeves ride up, and her eyes have the same odd grey tint as Merle’s. “Honestly, I don’t want to talk about Wonderland any more than you do, I imagine. And all I had was my own wits and a hired wizard. Not much of a queen then.”

Taako balls a fist on the tabletop as he stares at her scars. “You knew,” he says, as if the wind has been knocked from him. He thinks of Magnus’s body, ash on the runway. The accusation, never once raised before, shakes him. It’d lived and festered deep, tucked away behind the more prevalent angers before it. “You knew what was in there and you still sent us.”

He’s wearing his glamour, of course. He doesn’t let it down. 

“I had to. You don't understand. I waited as long as I could. All that training? I thought….” She thinks of Taako and Merle walking into her so-called throne room, the raw broken moment when she thought Magnus was dead, the loss like ashes in her mouth. “I made you as ready as I could, so much more ready than I had been. I'm sorry it wasn't enough.” Her face twists, holding back tears. “Add it to my tab.” She moves to take another drink of tea, but she's already finished it. 

He stands abruptly and practically snatches her cup from her hands. He turns his back to her as he fills their two cups with boiling water and makes her tea once more, like muscle memory.  _ Her tab,  _ he thinks with disdain, but he can’t bring himself to hurl any more insults. “You should have told us,” he mutters, looking down at their nearly identical cups as the tea leaves steep. 

She stands, pushing the chair across the floor with a scraping that cuts through the silence. She starts to move towards him but stops, leaning against the chair. 

“I thought — I thought that's what I was doing. I suppose not, though. I could have been more specific. Or maybe not. They were different with different people, you know.” She sighs. “Communication is not exactly my strong suit.”

“No fucking shit.” Taako sighs. It’s easier to blame her than to blame the Bell, or their plan, or himself. He watches a splash of milk billow through her pink tea. “Almost died in there but it’s chill, I’m cool. Doesn’t matter to me. Maggie, on the other hand…” 

Her knee pops noisily as she walks away from him and into the kitchen doorway, looking at the wall of family pictures lining the hallway beyond. From here she can see Taako between Lup and Barry, his arms thrown around them both. With Angus, the two of them wearing enormous matching hats. Angus has gotten so tall so quickly, she thinks. A close-up portrait with Kravitz, where Taako is pulling a face, while Kravitz's expression is so tender her heart aches with it. Outside the house in Raven’s Roost, with Magnus of course, both of them throwing up v’s with their fingers behind each other’s heads, a dog’s snout up close in the foreground. 

“Merle told me everything,” she says, carefully looking at the pictures and away from Taako. “If you— When you— I'd like to help, if I can. He deserves whatever I can do.” She glances back at him then away. “I know he almost took a turn for you, so you wouldn't have to….”

He thuds a hand on the countertop, hard enough to shake the teacups. "Yeah!" he yelps, almost surprised by his own voice as it cracks. “Yeah, he sure tried to. He would have, too, if I let him. Right after he forgot that rotted piece of garbage who ruined his life, and there I was, worried about…” 

He looks up at her, but she’s still staring at the pictures on the wall. He’s beautiful in all of them. His skin crawls under the glamour as he laughs humorlessly. 

“But that’s just who he is,” he murmurs, taking his cup into his hands. “And who I am, I guess. Your m fish couldn’t erase that much.” 

She says the first thing she said to him when they met on the moon; the thing that first came to her then comes to her now. “Don't sell yourself short,” she says, her voice soft. “In some ways, for him, it must be a blessing. His nightmares about the Roost are bad now, I can't imagine how much worse they were before. 

“They’re— yeah, they were bad. Worse than they are now, that’s for sure.” 

He swallows as a beat of silence passes between them. She’s still looking at the pictures. Her brows knit as she picks out an old picture; her fingertips ghost across the surface of one of her own sketches of Magnus with his arms around Taako. They look so young. 

“And you — you took the turn, you lost —” She turns and looks at him, almost as if she could see through the glamour. “You  _ had _ already lost so much, long before you got to Wonderland. I took it away. So I get it.”

Her eyes cut through him and he feels indignant. His hands tighten around the fragile teacup in his palms. “Yeah, totally. You  _ got _ it. The old pictures look better, right?” 

She pinches the bridge of her nose. “Taako.” She opens and closes her mouth several times, not entirely sure where to start. “Perhaps this was a bad idea.” She looks up at the ceiling, sighs. “I'm afraid I'm just making things worse. Thank you for the tea. I'm sorry, again. Tomorrow….” She trails off with a shake of her head. 

“I kept the other ones,” he says, eyes trained on the wall. “The drawings. I’m not gonna fuckin’ hang them up, but I didn’t throw them away.” 

She can see exactly the ones he means, the ones that used to be pinned up on the wall of his cabin. All three of them together, on the beach, at the cafe in Tesseralia, with the puppies. There was one of just the two of them, her and Taako, a warm-up sketch while she was working on her painting for the mountain. She'd had to work from memory, since he was so busy with his philosophy students. She'd used the square near the IPRE headquarters as a background: the home they'd both lost. He'd stolen it out of her studio to put up in his cabin. 

“You have a beautiful home,” she says. “I'm sorry it's not the one we talked about.” 

As she moves back to the table, his stomach twists tight. He can feel it building in him, the accumulation of every word, every thought, every hurt since the ichor touched his lips. He wants her to leave, if for no other reason than to give him a way out of this while still saving face. Something inside him quickens, but it’s not anger. There’s no anger left for her, not now. 

He thinks, as he sets his teacup down, that it may be grief.

She takes a deep breath. “Tell Kravitz I said hello, and I imagine I'll see you tomorrow.”

“Magnus built the kitchen,” he says quietly as she turns to get her things. “You’re standing in it.”

“Oh.” She stops in her tracks, coat forgotten. “Oh, Taako.” She looks around, really looks for the first time. She steps past him into the room, touches the countertop. “He did, didn’t he?” She swallows heavily. “He learned how to do all of this from Steven, when he lived in Ravens Roost. It's beautiful. It's…everything where you wanted it.”

He can’t watch as she looks around the room, the kitchen they’d mused about beneath stars of countless different worlds, in wonder. “Yeah, well, what Taako wants, Taako gets, right?” he jokes weakly. The tears come anyway, this time without ceremony or any chance of stopping. “The idiot learned carpentry just like he said he would, and that was when he didn’t even know. I, um… I don’t think about it most of the time, ‘cause why bother, but since you’re here, I guess…” 

“You know the little room back behind the stairs?” (In Magnus’s house, in Ravens Roost, she doesn't say, doesn’t need to say.) “It's the — that's from one of the ideas I had for the library. The one with the window seat. I came in the first time, and there it was.” She leans against the counter — the pastry nook. The inlaid marble is cool under her hands. 

Taako barks a laugh through tears. “He’s just a stupid romantic. He keeps trying, even though we’re—“ 

He tries to come up with words, but his mouth feels dry. He looks up at her through tears.

“What are we?” she murmurs. “After all this, what are we?”

It bursts from him just as his tears, without regard or permission. “You were my best friend, Lucretia,” he cries. “And you— I know  _ why  _ you did it, but I don’t know how you  _ could.” _

“I thought I had to. I thought it was a kindness.” She runs her hand over her face and through her hair. She wipes the tears from her eyes hard with the side of her hand. Her voice is raw. “I don't even remember anymore.” Her breathing is shallow. “I miss you and I know I don't have the right to.”

“I miss what it was.” Fat tears roll down his chin. “I miss what it was supposed to be. I just can’t— every time I see Lup, or Angus, or you, or Magnus, it’s  _ there.  _ And I’m not like him. I can’t just let it be the past like he can. I never learned how.”

“Oh gods, Taako, it was stupid. I was stupid.” She moves as if to touch him, but hesitates, pulling her hands back to her side. “I dug myself in too deep.”

Taako sobs.

“I think back, and I can't believe — I told you that the red robes were evil — I told you not to trust Barry. I can't believe — I mean:  _ Barry.  _ My friend. Your  _ brother.  _ I got so far into it — too deep and I —” She takes a deep shuddering breath. “I've tried to make peace with what I did. I couldn't go on, otherwise. And on good days, I can see…. I mean, we're going to be celebrating some of that tomorrow, right? But —” She stops, uncertain if he can even hear her. 

“It's okay if you can't let it go. You don't have to be him. You're still…. You're still good. I still….” She lets the thought unspoken hang between them. 

“I trusted you and I loved you and I don’t— I don’t know how it could ever be that way again.” He’s  _ embarrassed  _ at the heaving cry that shakes his sentence. He’s embarrassed that he’s here at all, that he’s said anything in the first place. That he opened himself up to this pain. It aches like a wound, unstitched, that could never quite heal.

He’s acutely aware of the ache. How familiar it is, and how all-encompassing. 

“Sometimes I  _ want _ it to be that way again,” he admits, his voice near silent from the tightness in his chest. “I treat you like shit, but I want it to be. I’m just so fucking  _ angry _ , and I don’t know how else to— to—“ 

His breath comes and goes a little too quickly and his head spins. As he reaches for the countertop, he notices, through blurry tears, her hand flinch forward once more at the sight of him wavering. 

“Taako? C’mon Taako, breathe.” She doesn't flinch now: she takes those few quick steps across the kitchen to him. “Please, just breathe.” And she puts a hand on his back. 

He leans forward and, before he can even think about it, rests his head on her shoulder. 

She strokes his back slowly, trying to get him to calm his breathing. Like she used to when Lup or Magnus died early in a cycle, or when the feeling of being untethered from reality overwhelmed him. Like he used to do for her. When words — any words — felt wrong. 

He squeezes his eyes shut and focuses on the warm fabric beneath his cheek. On the sweet lavender and rose that linger on her breath. It’s comforting. He doesn’t want it to be, but it is. Gradually, his breathing slows, just as it had so many times, so many years before. 

He allows himself another sob and, trembling, pulls away from her, overwhelmed and needing space. “Fuck,” he mutters, wiping the back of his hand across his nose. “I’m—“

He’s sorry. 

It gets trapped in his throat, a knotted foreign language. A forgotten feeling. What was he sorry for? 

He’s not ready to be sorry. 

But as her hand lingers on his arm, he thinks, maybe, someday, he could be.

“Don’t fuckin’ look at me like that,” he mutters instead, but he doesn’t push her away. 

“Hmm.” She lets go of his arm. To her own surprise, she doesn't want to, but she does it anyway. “Well….” She looks out of the window again, clears her throat. “I'm sorry.” 

She's said it so many times, to pretty much everyone, more than once. She finds she means it more now.

“I, um.” He stops. There’s something there, a thread he’s afraid to follow, unraveling after remaining wound taut for years. “I understand.”

She's still stumbling towards further apologies when his words hit her. “You…. Okay. Okay. That is — okay, yes.” She clears her throat again. “If…. If you ever wanted to come up and visit…. It's not so, uh, regal now. We could, you're welcome any time….” It feels utterly inadequate. 

He sniffs. “If you’re asking for my interior design expertise, you should know by now that it doesn’t come free.”

She chuckles fondly and he joins in. 

A small smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. The smile on hers is nearly identical. 

**Author's Note:**

> We're gonna have some pretty intense liner notes coming about this eventually, along with a prologue kind of thing by me and an epilogue kind of thing by @epersonae so... yeah! 
> 
> Edit: have [5400 words of feelings and process](https://epersonae.tumblr.com/post/169290970990/the-longest-liner-notes-that-ever-linered)! (or don't, w/e)
> 
> A huge, huge thank you to @emi_rose for all of her fine editing work that took this to the next level <3 
> 
> Let us know what ya think and keep an eye out on tumblr, I (@hops) am @magcretia on tumblr, and @epersonae is the same on both.


End file.
